Man With a Sword Read online

  Hereward was about to make a reply, still smiling; but the Empress touched him on the chest and said, ‘I command it. You know who I am.’ The smile froze on Hereward’s face and he bowed before her and left the room.

  When he had gone Gunhilda quietened Harold, telling him roundly it was wrong to quarrel in another man’s house. At last Harold seemed to see sense, and, in his abrupt way, begged the Danish King’s pardon.

  King Swein was weary of them all. He went to his fig-chest and unlocked it.

  ’Here,’ he said, ‘taste this fruit. This will put all unwise thoughts out of your heads.’

  He began to chew at the plumpest fig he could find, feeling the magic coming into him with each bite. Gunhilda, who had had figs before, wasted no time in eating as many as she could. But Earl Godwine went to the window and stared out, ignoring the fruit. This hurt King Swein, but not so much as the thing Earl Swein was doing. He took a handful of figs, then, having tasted each one, spat out the fruit and flung the precious pieces into the fire.

  ‘This is Eastern rubbish!’ he said. ‘Soon we shall all fall sick of the plague from eating such things. I tell you, King of Denmark, this is some Saracen plot. These things are not fruits, they are mummified parts of dead men, Christians, most like. If you are wise, you will get the bishop to shrive you before the sickness gets a hold on you!’

  King Swein began to wonder. Perhaps young Godwine was right. There was something strange about figs; they were not like apples or pears. He began to trace the Arabic carving on his chair with his finger, as a protection. Then he suddenly thought that this would not do either. Perhaps the Arabic meant something bad, something evil against him, too. And he would only be quickening his doom by tracing it. He wished that the Godwines had stayed away from his house. He even wished that Gunhilda would go back to her husband in Germany, and take that young carle Hereward with her.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he thought, ‘I will get the Bishop from Odense to wash me with holy water. It is lucky he is staying in Aarhus now. And if he cannot promise me complete freedom from plague, then we will see what his head looks like on a spike. I pay my dues to the Church - I will have value for them, or know why.’

  But the next day something happened which caused King Swein to forget all about the Bishop, or even the plague. He forgot about them both so effectively that before midday he had eaten half his store of figs in his anxiety, without a thought of Saracen magic any more.

  5. Attack at Night

  Just before the bell of Aarhus Kirk rang for Prime, when the sun came flaring across the Sound like a barn-fire, there was a great shouting in the courtyard.

  Kitchen-women ran about yelling and covering their heads with shawls, and all the dogs started to bark so wildly that the hawks in the mews jumped up and down on their perches like mad things.

  King Swein was already awake. He ran to the nearest window and looked down.

  Two shag-haired thralls were carrying a limp bundle wrapped in old blankets. They were finding it very heavy and were telling all who would listen that if they had been free men they would have left the body where they found it, lying in a ditch. But, they said, it was the body of a carle, and so they had to bring it in, though there was little enough life left in the man.

  King Swein, who was responsible for paying blood-debts to the families of any of his carles who got hurt in his service, felt that life was using him unfairly these last days. He put on a gown of thick wool and went downstairs.

  Gunhilda was already before him, her hair hanging wild down her back. She was out in the yard, kneeling over the body and cursing the Godwines.

  Over her shoulder, King Swein saw that the wounded carle was Hereward, and not one of his own men. He was thankful for that, until the Empress turned on him and said, ‘You dotard! So you give shelter to murderers here! Much good will that do you when my husband, the Emperor, hears of it. You listen to Godwine Snake-tongue, who promises you a rainbow - but you never stop to think that my man can give you the sun and the moon if he so wishes. Well, you may look to see King Magnus coming down through the Skager Rak any month now - and with fifty ships from Germany beside him.’

  She turned from Swein and went on stripping Hereward to find his wounds. There was a deep one in his back, under his left shoulder-blade. And another on his chest, just beneath his byrnie.

  Swein felt angry and sick and weak and miserable and weary - all at the same time. Just because a carle, and an English carle at that, had been hurt in a fight, he must lose Denmark.

  ‘Curse Earl Godwine!’ he said to himself. ‘And his two sons! May they burn! ‘

  Gunhilda turned once more and said with venom like a snake, ‘And as for your kinsmen, Beorn and Osbern, in England - well, you can look to see the burying of them within the week. My arm may be a woman’s, but it is long.’

  Swein mopped his wet face and turned to a Danish carle who had just appeared, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  ‘Run to the guest-house,’ he said. ‘Bolt the doors and set a guard about it. Hold the Godwines, even if you have to put a spear into them. But tell the men not to do that unless it is very needful. Hurry, man, hurry!’

  As the carle shambled away King Swein bent over Hereward. The Englishman had lost a deal of blood and his eyes were very dark and glazed. A cut on the head matted the cropped hair down one side, and he had bled from the ears. That was not a good sign, Swein thought. Usually it meant an injury to the brain.

  Swein said to Gunhilda, ‘I have sent men to hold Godwine. He is my kinsman, but I will punish him.’

  The Empress was bathing Hereward’s wounds gently and she did not turn. But she said, ‘He is my kinsman, too. But this boy means more to me than any kinsman, Denmark.’

  The King’s leech came tut-tutting then and had Hereward carried into the hall. King Swein tried to think of his great father, Ulf of Norway, and of his brave hero grandfather, Swein Forkbeard, who had killed a dragon and burned thirty churches in his time. But no comfort came from them.

  Nor did it come from the carle who rushed back to him. ‘The guest-house is empty,’ the man shouted. ‘The beds were not slept in, Swein. A thrall told me he saw the three Godwines riding southwards like black demons two hours before dawn. There is no horse living that could catch them now.’

  When King Swein struck him across the face, the carle did not complain. He had lived at Harthacnut’s court at one time and knew that he was lucky to be treated so mildly, being the bearer of ill tidings.

  King Swein met the leech on the stairs later. The old man shook his head and said, ‘It is likely that he will live, lord. The wounds are deep, but we have put spiders’ webs over them and moss. The bleeding has stopped. He is young enough to heal well.’

  Swein said, ‘Then why, in God’s name, do you wear this black face, man? Why does the mourning-harp sound in your voice, you old sheep?’

  The leech shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘We can mayhap heal the body - but what of the brain? That was the worst blow he took - and one he thinks that Harold gave him. He woke enough to tell us that - the three set on him as he came back from the village from seeing a girl he had taken a fancy to. The old Earl struck him in the ribs, Swein came behind and put the dagger in his back. But he thinks it was Harold who hit him on the head when he was down and his helmet off. That was the coward’s blow, and the direst.’

  King Swein sat on a step, his face in his hands.

  ‘Fetch the best leeches you can find,’ he said. ‘Fetch them up from Miklagard, from Syria, if you must. But see to it that this young fool gets well. Do that and I will give you your own weight in silver. I swear that before Odin and Christ.’

  The leech rubbed his thin hand over his lips and said, ‘We can heal the hole Swein’s knife made. But it is my belief that Hereward will never be right in the head again.’

  All the King said was, ‘Heal the hole and be content. A berserk needs no brains!’

  Later that day King Swein went to Gunhilda�
��s chamber, where Hereward had been taken. All the window-holes had been covered with curtains to keep the cold air away, and the room was heavy with the smell of potions and burning herbs. The leech was giving the carle a tincture of toad-flesh, dried and ground to powder, mixed in sour milk with the flesh of earthworms and spiders. As fast as he poured it down a horn funnel into Here ward’s mouth, it ran out again, over his chest and on to the bedding. King Swein retched with the smell. ‘Besides,’ he thought, ‘those sheets are of finest linen and are worth a cow, or three pigs. With this mess on them they will be ruined.’

  He was going to say something about this, but Gunhilda was praying so fiercely at the bedside he did not dare.

  Then, as he sat miserably, shuffling his feet and wishing he were anywhere - in Iceland or Ireland - the carle on the bed suddenly gave a great groan and sat up without warning. Gunhilda let out a little scream, the old leech dropped the horn funnel and the clay pot that held the filthy mixture. A serving-woman tried to push Hereward down again, but the carle swept out his heavy arm and knocked her sideways.

  ‘Give me ale!’ he shouted hoarsely. ‘Give me ale! I have been at the oars all day and all night. Is this how King Swein treats a Viking? Where is the ale, I say? Have I brought a boatload of slaves from Northumbria for nothing?’

  Queen Gunhilda stood up and reached out to comfort Hereward, but he even struck out at her and shouted, ‘Take away this witch! This is the Saracen woman I told you about. Burn her at the stake, I warn you! Now bring me ale, and my sword. Ah, I see an old man here who tried to poison me. I will have his head first.’

  Hereward began to struggle out of bed. The leech fell back afraid against the wall, his hand on his heart. Gunhilda ran weeping from the room to think her champion had lost his wits. King Swein followed her, trying to tell her that one carle was not worth all this commotion.

  He was half an hour consoling her, and when he crept up to the chamber again the room was empty. The fires had gone out. All that was left to tell the tale of that strange affair was a greasy mixture of the toad-potion on the fine linen sheets, mixed with blood, because the carles wounds had opened again.

  No one in the courtyard had seen Hereward pass, though one old woman, the widow of a thrall out on the lonely heathland, said that at twilight a troll with rolling eyes had come from a gorse-bush and had carried away a sheep. She had seen the troll begin to eat the creature raw, she said. First he ate the hind-legs, then the fore-legs, then the head. He was keeping the body for the last, she thought. When King Swein heard this he had the old woman whipped for lying. But he got no better truth out of her. Hereward was gone.

  6. Boar’s Head Helmet

  Little wonder the questing carles of King Swein did not find Hereward. For ten days and nights he lay in the pigsty behind the old woman’s house on the heathland, in a stone runnel covered with straw. She had seen him crawl there on hands and knees, moaning. But this was not the tale she had told King Swein. The King’s men beat her quite hard, but the whipping was worth it, for she had gained a man in the house once more.

  Yet for a while Hereward was little enough of a man. His body was thin and for almost a year the wounds in his chest and back gave him such pain that he could hardly lift a bucket, so that he had to walk bent like an old man. His hair had grown long in that time, and part of it, near his deep wound, had turned snow-white. He had lost both his sword and his byrnie, but this only troubled him vaguely, when he thought about it, which was not often.

  The old widow-woman looked after him much better than the King’s leech, using country remedies on his wounds — such herbal medicines as had been passed down the generations in a land where men had carried sword-hurts since the world’s dawning-time.

  And so, by one spring or another, she had got him right again - or as right as it seemed he would ever be. He and she would sit over the hearth-stone in the cold evenings, by the light of a tallow-fat rush, and talk. Once when carles broke in they took the couple for man and wife.

  ‘What’s your husband’s name, old crone?’ asked the captain.

  Hereward had just enough sense to put on his thickest accent, such as the slaves and geburas of old King Cnut’s time had used in Lincolnshire, and told them he was a Welshman called Griffog. When they asked him how he came to be in Denmark, he said that he had sailed in a curragh of tarred hide into the big sea to take service with Swein, but his flimsy boat had foundered on a skerry and a Danish ship had brought him into Lijmfiord.

  The captain laughed loud and said, ‘Thy heart seems good, Welshman, but Swein has no use for bent dry old tinder. He needs young stags to fight his battles. Still, even a good heart is worth something; so we will let you stay with this old hag here. Perhaps the store of this steading will increase with a man about, then King Swein will draw a bigger tithe from it. Fare you well, and watch that you don’t burn the thatch down with your rushlights.’

  When he had gone the old woman, Gytha, said, ‘What does he expect us to do, sit in the dark?’

  Hereward answered, ‘I am always in the dark, candles or no. There is a darkness in my head that candles will not light.’

  Gytha gave him warm goat-milk flavoured with wild honey and said, ‘There, there, lad. It will be better next year, or the year after.’

  To her, alone and friendless in the wind-blown land, one year was much like another, and had been so since her husband had an oak tree fall on him in a storm that blew right down from Iceland.

  So King Swein never knew that Hereward was still in Denmark. As for Gunhilda, she soon forgot her young champion and found another, a Norman youth named Bertrand who could play the lute.

  Strangely enough, Hereward’s memory still recalled how a man should make hay, milk a cow or a goat, deliver a lamb, mend a thatch, and gather kindling. He did these things well enough, though for the space of three years he was very slow at everything - even at putting food into his mouth. But his memory did not yet recall sword-play, or anything to do with war. And for the time being the names of the Godwines had gone from him as though his mind was a parchment, scrubbed clean with sand so that something else could be written on it. He only knew, in his bad dreams, that there had been wicked men who had hurt him.

  When he shouted out aloud in these dreams, old Gytha would comfort him. So he got to think of her as a mother, and when there was no one about even called her ‘mother’. This pleased her, for she had never had children of her own.

  Then, one winter five years or more after Hereward had first come to the lonely steading, he was in the barn sharpening an old axe to split kindling-wood. Outside, among the thick bushes, he suddenly heard a padding of feet and a harsh snuffling. He went to the door and saw pad-marks that seemed to go in a circle all about the sheep-pen. The marks were black in the white snow and you could not miss them.

  Hereward pondered a while, then said to himself, ‘That is a wolf - and a big one. Wolves are the enemies of men. Master Wolf, you are my enemy!’

  Hardly stopping to think what he was doing, he went from the barn to the place where the tracks ended. A big grey wolf lay among some holly bushes, snuffling and trying to bite at an arrow which stuck from his hind-leg. It had been there a long time, for he had bitten the feathers off it, and had gnawed the shaft far down. If the hair had not gone from his leg, it would have been hard to see.

  Hereward stood near the wolf with the axe in his hand and said, ‘You are an old wolf who cannot hunt with the others, so you come here to wait for the lambing season. You lie in ambush for the little beasts that cannot defend themselves, don’t you, Master Wolf? And that is no fair fight, Master Wolf. You should know that a warrior must only fight his equals; and when he is wounded, he must give up all thought of being a warrior and must live in peace.’

  While Hereward was talking the wolf stopped gnawing and licking and stared back at him with puzzled light eyes flecked with brown and amber. No man had ever talked to him before and Hereward wore a wolf-skin jacket that still carr
ied the scent of its first possessor.

  Then Hereward kneeled down close to the wolf and said, ‘Here am I, at a disadvantage; just as you are. Now prove yourself, Master Lamb-killer.’

  The wolf had got Hereward’s true scent now and knew that he was a man, and a weak man at that. The creature shifted his hind-parts in the snow and sprang. To Hereward it was as though a cloak of darkness was being spread above him, and he struck upwards with the axe. Then the wolf fell down on to him, knocking him into the snow, yelping, and snapping at its own forefeet. Hereward got his breath back, rolled the animal from him, and used the axe again.

  The wolf lay still. And while Hereward stood above it, watching for any sign of life, he heard the low sound of laughter behind him and turned round.

  There was a man standing by a broken old stone wall, looking at him and nodding in a friendly fashion. He was a very big man, dressed in magnificent clothes. On his head was an iron helmet set with silver, clipping down under his jaws, a boar-head crest scowling from its peak. On his broad breast was battle-mesh of bronze and iron, every other link, and trimmed below in teeth. At neck and arm were gold bands. At waist, hand’s breadth, was a war-belt spiked and studded with iron. His sword was almost the length of a man, his dagger half the width of that man’s hand. His hair under his helmet down to his breast flared red as blood, its plait-ends wound with gold wire.

  Such a man, his tall shield under his armpit, leaning, his legs crossed, his sword-tip in the snow, its pommel near his chin, his spear point rising like a pine-tree over his head, seemed a god.

  Hereward gazed at him, wolf’s blood over his body and face, and said at last, ‘You, an old king come from under the ground, come from a howe?’

  The man laughed again but only said, ‘That was carles axe-work, not thrall’s. There were Vikings in the world when you first learned that stroke, man.’

  Hereward tried to understand him, but the darkness got between the man’s words and his understanding. He said, ‘You, an old king then?’